


Stratum

by strawberry_wine (psalloacappella)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Bittersweet, Bonding, Character Study, Devotion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 16:07:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30142104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalloacappella/pseuds/strawberry_wine
Summary: “You know if you were shitty,” he says, “you wouldn’t be here.”She raises her eyes to his, startled. Of course, she’ll never catch his gaze with her own.Unsure of what would happen if she did.“So you’d better impress me, Ral.”❦In which Petra learns to love the legend.
Relationships: Levi Ackerman/Petra Ral
Comments: 14
Kudos: 48





	Stratum

**Author's Note:**

> soft exploration of characters I've never written before. I'm a baby for rivetra. help.

❦

The first days:

Blisters, so many. Exhaustion, the type taking up residence in the impenetrable marrow of her bones. 

But this is what she fought for. Pain and devotion to a cause larger than her minuscule existence, a blip and errant mark on a map. Only in this, freedom. 

Her choices, not unlike her murderous and impressive (for a woman, Oluo says glibly) Titan killing record, establishing her earned place — Petra’s aim is always true.

When her eyes land on the legend for the first time, she isn’t quite sure what she makes of it. A man cut from much rougher cloth and so unfamiliar from the sort of her own small town, the average idyll she’s left in the dust.

At once he’s nothing like the mythos but everything about which they’ve whispered. From the chapped lips of working-class stiffs into the earshells of tired mothers, drifting into childrens’ overactive imaginations at parents’ creaking storytelling knees. They always, _always_ want a sordid tale.

Levi: Detached, disassociated. Petra pens this in her early letters home. 

Except, of course, when he inspects his squad’s fingernails and the first few times she’s struck with bewilderment and _are you blushing at humanity’s strongest right now? Embarrassing._

“You’d do well to follow her example.” He growls at his newly-formed squad, prowling up and down the line as a cranky jungle feline. “You’re being outdone by the rookie.”

That infinitesimal half-second his gaze and gait lingers is all in her fucking head, she knows. 

She’s . . . sure.

  
  


Levi: Ruthless with the highest standards;

“You’re not training on that leg,” he snaps. 

The scolding feels like childhood discipline. Worse, because she wants to please him, protect him, more than she’d admit and he would accept. She’s made it so far, and won’t accept being undone by a thing so pathetic as an accident.

Gritting her teeth, blinking back threatening temperamental tears, her chin snaps up with an aggression she’s sure will get her keelhauled and fed to Titans. 

“Sir, I have to continue. I won’t be dead weight for you.”

“Ral, please,” he drawls, and with his stupid small arms folded and his hip cocked she has the rippling, sudden urge to punch him, “you hide pain like shit. It’s expected, first big accident and all.”

Pristine fingernails, digging into the thigh fabric of her uniform dress whites. A grip determined, a frustrating scream at the back of her throat.

“Still young enough to be angry and stupid,” he adds. Is it a sneer, tugging at his lips, or a grimace? He is still so hard to know. She may never.

“Sir, I—”

“Take a day or three. Think on where you want to be, how you want to live.” 

There’s a moment, and the apple of his throat moves in a way that suggests a gulp, a reticence. Unreadable.

“You’ll break bones. You’ll go to sleep defeated. You’ll range beyond the walls, stain your hands with kills.” Abruptly he turns, the back of humanity’s strongest to her, and sees the subtle ( _you’re crazy!)_ bow of his head. 

“You’ll be in my shadow,” he says. Like she’s not meant to hear. “A bloody one.”

The longest pause, in which she can’t hide the slight accordion wheeze in her chest, rib bones out of place and struggling.

“Decide, then.” His voice is sharp, razing her over shattered glass. “Decide if this shit is worth it to you.”

An order of four hospitalized days becomes two and an evening, and the morning Levi sees her chin held high, fist against her heart, fresh scar glimmering on the angle of her cheekbone _against so young, too young skin,_ he feels something like an ache, unfamiliar.

Perhaps pride.

Perhaps guilt.

Petra tears up her fifth letter draft, reminds herself staunchly to burn the unsent, erase the confessions and musings from this earth. Embarrassing, starry-eyed, inappropriate. 

> _I believe in him. I believe in this squad, in us._
> 
> _— will devote myself to him, no matter the cost —_
> 
> _— wonder if he knows I —_

She scratches it out with such vigor the table’s left with pen scars.

  
  
  


Levi: Joyless;

Though it’s at her expense, his snort of disbelief still comes soft. Perhaps again it’s all in her head. Who wouldn’t laugh at her childish swaying, a holdover from a charming-nothing town working long agricultural arcs under the sun; who wouldn’t be skeptical, at her, young and dumb and from nothing he could understand, still able to hear music in her mind?

Still with a tiny corner of the heart all to herself, happy and whole?

“It’s certainly not shit.” He shrugs. “You can carry a tune. What’s it from?”

A small smile she won’t share. Continues the process of tea preparation with her back to him.

“Considering my roots, it’d be a tune sung while working under the sun,” she says. Pauses, then opens the cupboard and removes another teacup. “In the heat.” 

He doesn’t comment on her silent invitation.

“But it’s possible it’s closer than that. I can’t exactly remember. A song I heard as a child. A lullaby.” 

As the last word escapes her lips, she presses them together to stifle it. _Always talking too much around him, he’s your Captain._ And why do even these fleeting seconds feel fraught, at once delicate and precipitous, but also gentle in such a way that no one hearing the moment relayed would believe her? Couldn’t believe it of him, this man, this short and angry human weapon whose gaze alone can strike dead a lesser being?

She doesn’t see it — at least, never when his eyes are on her. 

The grey is there, sifting, mottled and humane.

Bold, (she feels,) the way she turns on her heel with the preciseness of a salute and the tray now holds two garnished cups. A challenge and entreaty in one. 

Answering the question she’s asked in action though not with speech, he reaches for the nearby chair without a word, lowers himself into it as response, and folds his arms. 

Again, a lingering heat, something to which she’s had to adapt in learning to function in a squad, to rely on one another, and particularly with him. This is loyalty. This is trust. Sweeps the unsettling emotion away as dust to sit across from her Captain. 

She’d never say out loud how she believes in him; it’s a sparkling notion he’d reject.

They take a moment, two, three, in the light. 

Clean fingernails, perfect-temp tea, a tentative and layered silence.

Midnight, twilight, feeling light, she writes:

> _It’s hard to believe, Papa, that a man so storied as this is human as can be._

  
  
He interrupts her ruminating with a gravelly voice, parched and scraping. 

“Great night’s sleep, huh?”

It’s been endless minutes of staring at her own hands, blistered and bruised, occupying a table in their common room in twilight, thinking of everything and nothing.

“What’s yer issue?” From her Captain, it has the tinge of a demand, one of which to share her feelings. It’s not a question she’s heard him ask anyone else, except maybe Erwin. 

Unable to begin, she hides her hands under the table and sighs.

“Pitying yerself?” 

“You have much more to say, Sir, after sundown.”

Insubordinate, a little. What is she thinking? Winces after the words leave her lips, knowing the fine line on which she balances but also thinking, possibly stupidly, she’s lucky enough to occupy a tiny sliver of his heart. 

No, not love. Never that.

He sighs, and here he taps at nothing on the table with a precise finger. Eyes askew, words coming in a careful way that makes her wonder. 

“You know if you were shitty,” he says, “you wouldn’t be here.”

She raises her eyes to his, startled. Of course, she’ll never catch his gaze with her own. 

Unsure of what would happen if she did.

“So you’d better impress me, Ral.”

Their eyes skip and connect in a moment, and Petra is warmed and burned by that momentary danger of attachment. 

_Heartbreak, to pine for a man like this._

“Absolutely, Sir,” she murmurs, unable to hide her smile. The shine threatening to dim the outside moonlight. Becomes a cheeky grin, and Levi’s brow digs deeper, hands a little clammy _the fuck’s she smiling about?_ and he takes them off the table as she finishes. “You can always rely on me.”

The gleam in her eyes when she repeats,

“I’ll impress you.”

And oh, he’d rather choke, die a thousand deaths before admitting she already has.  
  


The vow she pens to paper seals her fate and future:

> _He is . . . and yet isn’t what they say._
> 
> _I will devote myself to him. I believe in his goodness, his leadership, his strength._
> 
> _Please don’t worry about me — I have the wind at my back and him as my guide._

  
  


Hundreds of miles away, a father reads between the layered lines of his daughter’s lovely letters -

\- (left) forever wondering.

**Author's Note:**

> If you made it to the end, thanks for reading! Love hearing from the internetss


End file.
